Trolls! Trolls! Everyone trolls!

Trolls. Trolls! So when did this addiction start? I don't know, and I don't particularly care. How many trolls do I have? I don't count them. What are the names? Only half a dozen or so have names, and I tend to forget them anyway.

Am I attached to my trolls? As much as I'd be attached to a living thing, a pet, or at least a plant.

They are comforting to me, and sometimes I truly need comforting and can't find it anywhere else. These two lovelies are the ones I ordered from Etsy recently and haven't received yet. And I was going to just be happy and wait for them, and then. . . 

I shouldn't have gone on eBay, I know. My cat tries to get me to stop.

But somehow, it never works.

I think the vendor of these trolls either has NO idea how much they are actually worth, or is salting her shop with incredible bargains to draw people in, as most stores do.

But here. 

BEHOLD!

The thing you have to realize is that I live in Canada, so trolls will cost me easily twice what they are in the States. Shipping and handling is ludicrous, often much more than what the troll costs (even for tiny ones that weigh a few grams). And this set of three, all told, was $57.00 in Canadian dollars. 

Any one of these large-sized (7", 8" and 9") beauties could command a couple of hundred in this country, given the pristine shape they're in. There is not much in the way of clothes, but I provide those, handmade with love and tailored to fit. Troll outfits are seldom very impressive unless you get those fancy custom-made ones from Etsy vendors such as Lucretia's Lair, and they'll run you $50.00 each (plus $65.00 shipping and handling).

The hair is in particularly good shape in this group, and the orange hair is gorgeous, a rare colour, and might even be a mohair replacement which would up the value by at least another $20.00 or $30.00. I only have one other mohair troll, and though he's totally lovely, there are flaws in the vinyl that would likely cut his market value in half.

So. . . sigh. More trolls. I had to buy them before someone else snapped them up, which has happened to me more times than I can count. I need something to make me feel better, I guess, as I wander through this wilderness alone.

I do troll box openings on YouTube which command the usual one (or zero) views, but I guess I do them for myself, and because I desperately needed a fulfilling hobby once the grandkids became adolescents and Grandma was no longer "cool".

Trolls take me back to the very best year of my life: 1964, when everything happened for me. The Beatles came on the Ed Sullivan Show for the first time on my tenth birthday. My Dad gave me a horse. (Yes, a horse.) I was in an accelerated Grade 5 class in school which was total mayhem, a 1960s educational experiment in which nobody learned anything all year and the teacher had a nervous breaktown by Christmas. Sheer bliss! I also stopped taking violin lessons, which was like having a thousand pounds of chains slide off my shoulders.

And - trolls. There were trolls. Two close friends also had troll fever, and it cemented the bond between us and made it magical.

Trolls aren't like Barbies or Cabbage Patch Kids or ANY other doll. Even calling them dolls doesn't seem to fit. They have a spooky, slightly creepy quality that some people frankly hate, but that makes them all the more appealing to me.

So I have FIVE trolls coming, five times the excitement, five times the bliss! 

I WANT THIS TROLL!

I. Want. This. Troll.

Don't ever start a collection, of anything, or this will happen.

What happened was - I don't know if I want to go back that far! Let's say I had a troll collection already, but somehow it was never complete. I felt guilty about every purchase I made, since we're on a very modest budget all the time.

AND THEN.

And then, today, rummaging in my wallet for my bus pass, I spied - a cheque. It had my name on it. I had almost forgotten I had it! And it had a tasty amount on it, too, very tasty.

The Canada Council for the Arts had sent it to me, not for a specific work but for contributing to "the arts" through publishing three novels and writing approximately 300 book reviews and over a thousand newspaper columns over a substantial period of time.

Pay.

I don't get pay from too many other sources. It also delighted me because it easily covered ALL my trolls, most of them costing five bucks and none of them more than forty (most of that being postage and handling).

I couldn't think of anything more apt than covering the cost of all my trolls with my Canada Council cheque. But do you realize what this means??

That's right. We're square, and I can once more feel guilty lusting after new trolls, looking on PicClick (an eBay search site) late into the night. My last "big guy" was most unusual, looked brand new which he couldn't be, and had a totally different configuration, as if made by another company. The troll world is odd and full of anomalies and huge gaps in information. I assumed however that he would be my last "big guy" and that if I got anything else, it would be a small Wishnik, simply because I didn't HAVE any Wishniks and it made a hole in my collection.

But I don't like Wishniks. I tried to like them. Their bulging eyes were pretty much their only outstanding feature. Most of them were old and the worse for wear, with sad clumps of hair coming away from the scalp. Some had no hair at all. The larger ones had hideous flat, elongated heads with huge ears and evil faces. No charm at all.

Wishniks were a direct knockoff of Dam trolls, which are still the gold standard for collectors, mainly because there are just more of them, at different price ranges, different manufacturing dates, and with vastly different designs. Wishniks are just, well, Wishniks. The ad that used to run when I was a kid irritated me: "Just let a Wish-nik/Let you come smi-ling through." They have double horseshoes engraved on the bottoms of their feet. 

Plus they just cost too damn much, $40.00 or more for a small troll in so-so repair.

Whether I get this "big guy" troll or not is undecided. There were a ton of photos on the eBay page, which was nice because sometimes you only get one grainy one, so I was able to make this wonderful animation. Often when I finally make my move, the troll is gone. Or I suddenly change direction and decide that I hate that troll and want something else.

THAT troll.

Post-mortem. Sigh. It happened again. Somebody bought that troll. That troll that was far too expensive for me, anyway. This is what happens when you start a collection. And the weird thing is, I've never collected anything in my life before!

Now I know why.

Turbo Snails and Mochi-knitting

There's some kind-of-a movie coming out about snails. Damned if I know anything about it, but I know my granddaughters, sweet little blue-eyed blondies with bouncy hair, LOVE snails and will probably go see it.

They love slithery, antennae-y, slime-trail-leaving snails, which they keep outside in the backyard in a sort of plastic box which serves as a snail ranch. Every so often Daddy shakes it out over the garden, and the snail-collecting starts all over again.

Snails this size are surprisingly easy to knit, though I had to refresh myself on the Magic Loop method which essentially knits a tube that doesn't require seaming. I could never knit on four needles to save my life.

The hardest part, of course, were the antennae, which had to be knitted as i-cords. It was only recently that I discovered this stands for "idiot cord". It's a way of getting around the four needles, I guess. There is snobbery and elitism in knitting as in everything else, and the four-needle, double-pointed crowd often looks down on those poor sods who only use two. Never mind, I just wanted to get the job done.

This is the original mega-snail I knitted for Erica, who must be 9 or 10 inches long. The pattern is out of a book of knitted amigurumi, but this one is atypical. Amigurumi are usually tiny, crocheted, and represent imaginary creatures. This one was honkin' huge and nearly impossible to knit. Surprisingly, the shell was relatively easy because it involved relentless decreases that pulled the tube into a curled ram's-horn shape.

The body, however. . . the instructions were woefully inadequate, only two pages, with NO illustrations. The patterns I frequently order on the net often run to twenty pages, with instructional photos on every page. So it's a wonder I completed this project at all. Having done the shell, however, I knew I couldn't stop, so I made up my own body which was more of a beanbag, stuffing it with plastic shot to give it stability. The plastic shot slowly leaked out of tiny holes in the body, however, necessitating a major repair job.


http://mochimochiland.com/2008/03/free-pattern-snails-and-slugs/

This is a link to the pattern on a charming site called Mochimochi Land. I approve, except I altered the pattern a bit (as I usually do), making the end of the snail shell a bit narrower (they're hard to curl under) and correcting a problem with the eyes.

Snails' eyes aren't placed the way they are here. They're on the ends of their icky, probing, viscous antennae.
The way the antennae look here, they're more like bunny ears. I made mine longer, with a bit of a blob on the ends so I could embroider on eyes.

The kids would never forgive me if these things were inaccurate.

(This doesn't look much like a real snail either. The movie I was talking about is called Turbo and it's about some sort of snail race. Actually, for their size, snails aren't slow. We've had the experience of looking at a snail in the back yard, going away for a few minutes, and coming back only to find it several feet away. All that determined slime-gliding must pay off.)

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There is always one more. . . doll

I don't know what gets into me, I really don't. I can't leave it alone, and I never could.

A few posts ago I was talking about fan art, which I've never done before, mainly because I have no artistic sensibilities whatsoever and can't draw or paint to save my life. Once during a manic phase, I did a lot of abstract painting and was convinced it was REALLY GOOD and went around scanning it and sending it to everyone. Unfortunately, it was shit. I had no idea why everyone seemed so embarrassed.

I don't know how artists do it, except through true talent and determination.

I can't leave it alone. These dolls, these alabaster time-travellers created by the mysterious genius Marina Bychkova (a Vancouver girl, I'm happy to say) pull something out of me, something equally strange.

I want to unjoint them and take them apart and see how they work, or at least dress and undress them. Why? What's the matter with me? I hated dolls as a little girl.

I didn't even have any, except an execrable Debbie doll with a big head and permed black hair like my mother's, and an even worse one called Miss Debutante. Does the average eight-year-old know or care what a "debutante" is? It's a strange term at the best of times, and like "chatelaine" it has no male equivalent. I used to call her "Miss De-BUT-ton-ty", when I called her anything at all.

I did mummify my Barbie, and got some strange looks for it, even from my schizophrenic brother Arthur who seemed to be from some other planet. What can I say, I loved mummies and hated Barbie and it seemed like a good solution.

I can't play with dolls even now, I can't afford one as good as these, and feel a bit silly prowling around doll shows where people just hoard them. So this is my only way of playing. 

I have to reveal a secret: while I played with images today, I worried about a medical test I'm having in a week. I don't feel well and I haven't for some time, though as usual nobody has a clue about it because "you seem fine to me". When you've hidden depression and other kinds of wretched imbalance for nearly 60 years, you get awfully good at it.

This seems to be "physical", meaning "not my fault" and "not something I'm just making up to get attention that I could snap out of any time I wanted to, except I don't want to". It's weird, because part of me hopes there's something wrong, or at least something they can locate, so it won't be one of those vague situations where you KNOW there is something wrong but no one in the medical community will acknowledge it.

It seems a bit idiotic to say, "Gee, I sure hope they find something wrong."

But I do.

I have another secret, and now I will reveal it. I wanted to use one of those hideous birds by Hieronymus Bosch in my "fan art", but discovered it really wasn't do-able, any more than my equally bright idea to make my own Russian nesting dolls. But I did find this, some sort of hawk making that screaming noise they do. What struck me is that its mouth was a perfect mother-of-pearl-looking heart, so I used that as a basis for my fan art, or desecrations, or whatever they are.

It just worked so perfectly. 

And now, for something completely different

Yesterday's rant stirred up some mixed feelings in me. It was one of those posts I usually delete because it comes from so far out in left field. But I decided to leave it up.  Please take it as irony of the most iron kind.

And in case you're wondering, my own marriage is nothing like that! Even as I write, I hear the vacuum cleaner running downstairs, and it ain't the cleaning lady. Later on he will put a meat loaf in the oven. Oh yes.

To provide some counterweight, I hope, I hereby display the rest of the stuffies I knitted for Lauren and Erica's joint birthday party on Saturday. I'm proud of these. They were fun to make, but also a lot of work. They are, top to bottom, the Ugly Ducking all grown up, plus his girl friend (and later, wife) Melinda Mallard;

A grizzly bear, unnamed (yes, I know there isn't a grizzly bear in The Ugly Duckling, but there was in my version; this one was so hard to make he was in and out of the garbage pail several times);

A penguin, definitely NOT in the story (one of the hits of the evening, though it was the easiest to make);

A dolphin, likewise, who looks like a girl dolphin (dolphinette?) to me;

And some ladybugs. Lauren loves them, and it's the name of her team for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation Walk for the Cure, which convened on Sunday, Grandma and Grandpa included. The five-kilometer walk was a bit of a stretch for us old people, but hey, it was for the best cause ever!

The Three Ages of Man: Car; Car;Car . . .

I was going to call this post "and we'll have fun, fun, fun. . . "

On the weekend, I went to my very first Car Show. I have no interest in cars whatsoever, except that once every few years, I stumble upon an antique car that literally takes my breath away. The last time it happened, it was a burgundy-and-cream Mercury Westergard from about 1940, one of those massive, bulbous cars with a sloping back and rear tires that barely showed. For some reason this automobile stopped me in my tracks.

Hoping for a similar find, I trudged through what seemed like miles of people's most cherished babies. Old guys had worked on these for years (and maybe a few young guys with tattoos and no job). It showed. Only a few came from pre-war times, and most had been souped up or otherwise tinkered with, the running boards removed, the engines jutting out unnaturally like tumors. This was too bad, because I love Harold Lloyd cars most of all.

So I was obsessed with a search for that 1940 Mercury, hoping it was owned by a local. I didn't find it, but 3/4 of the way through our hot trudge on a sultry August afternoon, I was stopped in my tracks.

I didn't know what it was, but it was stunning, the ultimate in beauty and grace, all wetly gleaming in chrome, cherry red and pristine white.

"It's a 1961 Corvette," my husband said. (He didn't need those little white cards behind the windshields to tell him the make and year of a car. Ever. In fact, he identified a few that were so exotic, it made my head spin.)

People sigh and drool over antique Corvettes. Now I know why. It looked kind of like a skin you'd slide into, erotic. There was no back seat. (The few '20s cars I saw had boxy carriage-like interiors, with roomy, plush, sloping back seats that seemed specifically designed for sex. They also had rumble seats in the back, completely separate and open to the elements, a perfect place to stash your mother-in-law. People were ingenious in those days.)

I don't know why this car held me transfixed. I'd post a picture of it, but I can't decide which one brings more tears to my eyes. Anyway, it led me to my usual wild goose chase for information, this time on the History of the Automobile.

If you ask people who invented the car, 95% of them will say, "Henry Ford." According to that impeccable source, Wikipedia, Ford came around about 200 years after the first experimental prototypes. These were wheezy little things with sewing machine engines, some even driven by steam. (This is why one of the above models has that Jiffy Pop thing attached to it, likely blowing the car along with hot air.)

Inventors were thinking in terms of "horseless carriages" for a long time, so wheels were huge and spoked, with hard rubber tires. About a thousand different people were working on the design, so I can't name any of them because it would be so incredibly boring.

I can't get this to cut and paste, but it's too good to leave out, so I'll transcribe it by hand (while trying to eat my peanut butter toast and drink Crystal Lite iced tea):

"By 1784, William Murdoch had built a working model of a steam carriage in Redruth, and in 1801 Richard Trevithick was running a full-sized vehicle on the road in Camborne. Such vehicles were in vogue for a time, and over the next decades such innovations as hand brakes, multi-speed transmissions, and better steering developed. Some were commercially successful in providing mass transit, until a backlash against these large speedy vehicles resulted in passing a law, the Locomotive Act, in 1865 requiring self-propelled vehicles on public roads in the United Kingdom be preceded by a man on foot waving a red flag and blowing a horn. This effectively killed road auto development in the UK for most of the rest of the 19th century, as inventors and engineers shifted their efforts to improvements in railway locomotives. The law was not repealed until 1896, although the need for the red flag was removed in 1878."

(Why is it that I can hear John Cleese saying, "And now for something completely different"?)

Anyway, enough of this fishy-sounding, probably concocted history written by a bunch of unemployed geeks who live on beer and Pringles. The process of developing the modern automobile was kind of like a steel mill where iron is melted down in a big blast furnace and spat out as ingots. Everybody poured something into the mix. Everyone stole from everyone else. Gradually, something cohered, solidified and emerged.

One of the first designers, back in about 1800, was named Benz. The names Daimler and Diesel came up as well. These were men, not things. This seems incredible to me, but there it is. Anyway, when the internal combustion engine was finally perfected somewhere around 1910, it was hailed as the greatest invention in the history of mankind.

No more horse dung! No more horses, period, except for the fast set who could afford polo ponies. Apart from the wheezy, rickety noises and familiar explosions, the car was deemed marvelous, and eventually, nearly everyone embraced it as a universally Good Thing.

Right. Until it began to poison the air and water to such a degree that our future survival is now very dicey indeed.

We're married to our cars. We conceive our children in them, we shine and wax them tenderly, and (especially) covet the ones we want and can't have. Some people's lives literally revolve around them. I couldn't give a shit, except when I see something like that sublime cherry-and-white '61 'Vette.

Oh OK, I'll try to find a picture already. I wanted to marry it, it was so beautiful. It exuded effortless grace and genius in design like few other material objects I've seen.

Maybe in another five years I'll see another one. Or not? I kind of wish they'd all go away. I'd have the horse shit back in a heartbeat.